Melbourne IT today admitted websites belonging to a
number of customers of its WebCentral brand went down over the
weekend, following a data corruption issue in its storage
systems.

Customers had been complaining online about the issue since
Friday morning, with updates to the problem being posted online
over the weekend. "This is a major, major issue for our
business," wrote one aggrieved customer on broadband information
site Whirlpool.

"WebCentral, a brand of the Melbourne IT Group, reported today
that it had experienced data corruption in one of its shared
storage devices on Friday 20 March and that the cause of the
incident was resolved on Saturday," the company said in a
statement this afternoon.

"Due to redundancy within the storage systems, the problem was
isolated and impacted a small percentage of the customer
base."

Melbourne IT's main storage vendor is IBM, although the domain
and hosting company didn't mention Big Blue in its statement,
saying only that supporting vendors had responded proactively and
quickly to address the problem.

"The company confirmed that the recovery process is in progress
and that customers had been restored over the weekend," Melbourne
IT's statement said. "Secondary effects of server corruption have
been identified and are being resolved."